Abstract
Live action role players make the imaginative worlds of tabletop games manifest through collaborative storytelling and embodied play. Escaping the everyday, these communities could radically reimagine culture and challenge oppressive ideologies. Instead, they are deeply invested in essentializing “race”. I conducted a three-year ethnographic study alongside 20 semi-structured interviews to explore racecraft in live action role play. Supporting the groundbreaking work of Karen and Barbara Fields, I find that racecraft is a social process—continually negotiated and maintained through intimate interactions and community exchanges. Through this process, the definition of “race” is continually adapted while belief in this category remains entrenched. When participants confront racist stereotypes, practitioners coerce marginalized members into a false exchange. These members are encouraged to share experiences detailing the damage of problematic representations. Practitioners then reduce these experiences to monolithic understandings of “race”. In this insidious manner, anti-racist confrontations become fodder for racecraft. Complicating this further, patterned racism is characterized as an inborn quality of whiteness, minimizing practitioners’ accountability. Responsibility is then shifted onto marginalized participants and their willingness to engage in “racial” education. This trap is ingrained in the double standard of racism, adapting “race” such that whiteness is unrestricted by the monolithic definitions applied to those outside this category.
Highlights
Eshe: So the race is called “Elvrani” and it’s an elf race but [in this world] the term elf is a slur
Before delving into racecraft and live action role play (LARP), we have to explore the relational nuances of this dynamic space
Doing so allows us to understand the community organization that foregrounds the racecraft explored in the following conversations
Summary
Eshe: So the race is called “Elvrani” and it’s an elf race but [in this world] the term elf is a slur. There’s four or five other slurs in the game. It becomes cool to use them because it shows how hardcore your character is. Because this is not real but it’s weird to see you have so much fun using a slur. [Author]: Have you ever had someone use these slurs against you?. It’s weird being an Elvrani and a person of color
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